Torturing The Truth: Louis Zamperini And The Black Sites In Our History

The weekend's football games were full of commercials for the movie version of Laura Hillebrand's Unbroken, the saga of the late Louis Zamperini, who ran for the United States in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where he shook Hitler's hand, and then, as a member of the Army Air Force in the Pacific, survived a plane crash and 47 days in an open boat, only to come ashore in the Marshall Islands, where, against all odds, his life got immeasurably worse. Zamperini was taken prisoner by the Japanese and imprisoned for three years, during which time, he was treated brutally, especially by a guard named Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a seriously sadistic bastard nicknamed "The Bird," who took a peculiar delight in tormenting Zamperini. Ultimately, Zamperini survived the torments of the damned at a place called Ofuna, which was one of the more horrible secrets of the war. The prisoners there were not treated as -- or reported as -- prisoners of war. The Geneva Conventions did not apply there. The International Red Cross was forbidden to inspect the place. Ofuna was a black site. Nobody knew the names of the prisoners. Even the local population was not informed of its existence. Its inmates called it The Torture Farm. Louis Zamperini rode out the war at The Torture Farm. Ultimately, he came to faith and forgiveness, even traveling to Japan to tell the guards who beat him that he forgave them. All except The Bird, who'd never come to trial, hiding out until people forgot about him, and living out his life in freedom and as a wealthy man. The Bird refused to see him. Now, having died only this year, Zamperini is a hero of the human spirit, his story all over the movie screens of a country, the posters showing him holding up a railroad tie in a Christ-like posture, which was one of the tortures The Bird put him through. It is an inspirational holiday film for a country that created its own black sites, its own Birds, and its own anonymous Louis Zamperinis, and which now doesn't much want to talk about it.

Kerry was not going rogue -- his call came after an interagency process that decided the release of the report early next week, as Feinstein had been planning, could complicate relationships with foreign countries at a sensitive time and posed an unacceptable risk to U.S. personnel and facilities abroad. Kerry told Feinstein he still supports releasing the report, just not right now. "What he raised was timing of report release, because a lot is going on in the world -- including parts of the world particularly implicated -- and wanting to make sure foreign policy implications were being appropriately factored into timing," an administration official told me. "He had a responsibility to do so because this isn't just an intel issue -- it's a foreign policy issue."

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It may be the worst, and the most cynical, attempt to put a story out with the Friday trash that I've ever seen -- and, if my suspicions, and those of a number of other people, are true, and this administration is trying to run out the clock, knowing that the new and more radically conservative Senate will bury the torture report forever, then that may be the worst, and the most cynical, political strategy I've ever seen. The word "Nixonian" would be inadequate, and I never thought I'd say that in regards to cynical political maneuvering.

Hill staffers and human rights advocates saw the Kerry call as a stunning reversal by an administration that has publicly supported the report's release for months. For Senate Republicans, who have warned about the potential fallout for more than a year, the administration is belatedly coming around to agree with their position. "There's always a lot going on in the world and the timing of the release of a report like this never convenient," one senior GOP senate staffer said. "They should have thought about that a long time ago and advocated against the release."

Mother of god, that's just lovely. Our American equivalents of Mutsuhiro Watanabe, our native Bird life, they don't even have to hide for a few years until it all blows over. Our American Watanabes write op-eds. They appear on television. They get big money to give speeches to brag about their inhumanity. And our government knows who they are, and our government loses its guts, and the American Watanabes -- as well as the Syrian, Egyptian, Polish, and Thai Watanabes to whom we subcontracted the work that was too much for our delicate constitutions, to say nothing of our delicate, and shredded, Constitutions -- prosper. The whole fandango with this report has been an embarrassment. The country behaved savagely, in contravention of its most sacred principles. It opened itself up as a market for hidden sadism and covert savagery. Even the local populations didn't know. And now, the government is being scared by the likes of Jose Rodriquez and Richard Cheney, the chief American Watanabes, into making sure the local population of the United States remains ignorant of what was done in its name. We can't even know the pseudonyms of our paid torturers. Which one of them was called The Bird in Pashtun, I wonder.

So as all the ads are run out for the cinematic re-telling of Louis Zamperini's remarkable tale of survival and redemption, the movie itself becomes a casualty of our continued residence on what Richard Cheney Watanabe calls "the dark side." His torment and triumph are cheapened by the very government he swore to defend. His service, and the service of all the men in Ofuna, the black site, has been betrayed. Because it is the policy of this government to obscure the consequences of its own brutality and inhumanity, the very act of buying a ticket to Unbroken has been rendered an act of towering hypocrisy.